2 ms·

> Do you think you don't have to remember anything to use a GUI? This. You can't imagine how many times I stared at a screenful of buttons that looked like an

> Do you think you don't have to remember anything to use a GUI? This. You can't imagine how many times I stared at a screenful of buttons that looked like an airplane cockpit or something, trying to figure out where in bloody hell was the function I needed. More than once, I would find out what the button is supposed to look like through reading help docs, but then fail to find the same button on the overly complex toolbar, since the toolbar, apparently having a mind of its own, would randomly decide to hide some of its buttons so that it would not appear as daunting (looking at you, Microsoft!) Give me bloody syntax and CLI that I can look up or Google over this clusterfuck any day.

crazygringo 15y ago
While I definitely take the side of the GUI in principle, when I think about the abominations that have been coming out of Microsoft... Not to mention the newest version of Skype... Whatever happened to a simple text menu, organized logically and hierarchically, where you pretty much know where anything will be? And simple dialog boxes, instead of ribbon-bar-palettes that show and hide different things depending on the width of your screen? A man page requires me to read the whole thing before I'm confident of what option I'm looking for, because it's presented as an unstructured list of parameters. A menu bar is hierarchical, and I should (theoretically) be able to find what I'm looking for quicker -- and I know if an option is disabled before trying it, and a dialog box asks me whatever else the program needs to know. Unfortunately, Microsoft and others are abandoning the tried-and-true principles of interface design. I refuse to use anything after Word 2003, but Google Docs is generally even easier.
- bluekeybox 15y ago
  > A man page requires me to read the whole thing before I'm confident of what option I'm looking for, because it's presented as an unstructured list of parameters Not necessarily. I can usually easily grep a man page for the keywords I'm looking for. Most users (even beginners) know how to search for words on a single long page of text. In fact, one of the users of my app (a content management system for biologists) has mentioned to me that he prefers to click on plain-text output instead of using default HTML paginated output because he can instantly jump to what he's looking for by using browser text search feature (I plan on providing a Javascript-based word lookup feature in the future to emulate this).

crazygringo 15y ago

While I definitely take the side of the GUI in principle, when I think about the abominations that have been coming out of Microsoft... Not to mention the newest version of Skype... Whatever happened to a simple text menu, organized logically and hierarchically, where you pretty much know where anything will be? And simple dialog boxes, instead of ribbon-bar-palettes that show and hide different things depending on the width of your screen? A man page requires me to read the whole thing before I'm confident of what option I'm looking for, because it's presented as an unstructured list of parameters. A menu bar is hierarchical, and I should (theoretically) be able to find what I'm looking for quicker -- and I know if an option is disabled before trying it, and a dialog box asks me whatever else the program needs to know. Unfortunately, Microsoft and others are abandoning the tried-and-true principles of interface design. I refuse to use anything after Word 2003, but Google Docs is generally even easier.

bluekeybox 15y ago
> A man page requires me to read the whole thing before I'm confident of what option I'm looking for, because it's presented as an unstructured list of parameters Not necessarily. I can usually easily grep a man page for the keywords I'm looking for. Most users (even beginners) know how to search for words on a single long page of text. In fact, one of the users of my app (a content management system for biologists) has mentioned to me that he prefers to click on plain-text output instead of using default HTML paginated output because he can instantly jump to what he's looking for by using browser text search feature (I plan on providing a Javascript-based word lookup feature in the future to emulate this).